Kodiak secures first commercial deal to supply driverless trucks for public highways

Autonomous trucking company Kodiak has signed its first commercial agreement to supply driverless trucks for use on public roads. The deal is with DTL Transport, a logistics operator. Under the arrangement, Kodiak is positioning itself as an asset-light technology supplier rather than an owner and operator of the trucks. The agreement marks a notable step toward commercializing driverless freight on public highways. The article provides limited additional detail on the deal's terms or timeline.

TechCrunch Founder Summit Boston Tickets Discounted Up to $100 Ahead of Nov. 4

The TechCrunch Founder Summit is set to take place in seven days at Boston's SoWa Power Station on November 4. Attendees can still save up to $100 on passes, but the discount window is closing. The event is designed to give founders direct access to experienced founders, investors, and startup leaders. The announcement is a promotional reminder urging readers to buy tickets before doors open.

TikTok launches Must Eat, an in-app restaurant guide built on user content

TikTok has introduced Must Eat, a new section of its app that aims to rival restaurant review platforms such as Yelp and Google Maps. The feature draws on roughly 40 million posts, reviews, and comments about dining that have accumulated on the platform. It organizes videos and discussions about local businesses into restaurant recommendation guides. Users can also leave reviews, call or book reservations, and search for nearby spots on a map. The announcement was made on Wednesday, with TikTok US CEO Adam Presser presenting the feature at a launch event.

JPMorgan, Coca-Cola and Dell Reject Inclusion in OKX-ICE Tokenized Stock Trading Plan

Nearly half of the companies on the original roster for a planned blockchain-based trading venue have objected to their shares being traded there. The venture is a joint effort involving crypto exchange OKX and ICE. Among the firms opting out are JPMorgan, Coca-Cola and Dell. The objections point to a growing reluctance among large corporations to have their stock tokenized and traded on blockchain-based platforms. The episode raises questions about the viability of the proposed tokenized equities venue.

Report alleges UAE secretly aided Iran-backed Houthis in targeting Saudi forces

A report published via the Times of India claims the United Arab Emirates has been covertly assisting the Iran-backed Houthi movement in attacks against Saudi forces. The allegations characterize the support as secret, meaning it was not publicly acknowledged by the parties involved. The article presents the claim as a report's findings rather than as an independently confirmed fact. Specific details of the alleged assistance and its timing were not included in the material provided. The matter underscores ongoing tensions among regional actors involved in the Yemen conflict.

Researcher finds airlock approval bypass in Hermes Agent guardrail, fixed in 0.2.3

A developer testing airlock, a prompt-injection guardrail plugin for Hermes Agent, found that its approval prompts could be skipped when a session ran unattended. In a oneshot run, a simulated agent sent mail contents to a local listener through a terminal command, and neither a prompt nor a block occurred. The cause was that airlock checked global settings while Hermes recorded unattended status within the individual turn. The issue was reported privately and fixed in airlock 0.2.3, which now asks Hermes's own approval logic whether a call can be approved without a human. The fix covers several run modes, including oneshot, yolo, cron, webhook and subagent contexts, and includes an end-to-end test. The author also describes a separate approach that refuses writes from tainted agents instead of asking for approval.

'India is strong, watch Dhurandhar': Arunachal min on ITBP chief's remarks on China border

ABLITERAX: an open framework for auditing and ablating LLM refusal representations

ABLITERAX is an open-source research system that locates refusal representations inside large language models and measures their linearity, multi-directionality, and distribution across layers. It performs targeted ablation under capability constraints and uses a held-out evaluation set to check that a drop in refusals does not come at the cost of general reasoning. The project's design stance stresses explicit limits, reporting of failures, and reversible, auditable changes to original checkpoints. Its authors argue that safety in frontier-scale and mixture-of-experts models is distributed across several pathways, so single-direction approaches tend to fail there. The document also specifies an architecture registry that requires verified adapters rather than name-pattern guesses for tensor mapping.

Louis Vuitton’s unbreakable glass stuns Paris rioters

Git Reset vs Revert vs Restore: When to Use Each

The article explains that git reset moves a branch to another commit, git revert adds a new commit that cancels an earlier one, and git restore copies file contents without changing history. The main deciding factor is whether others have already pulled the commit: if they have, revert is the safer choice, and if not, reset can be used. The author tested all three commands on Git 2.56.0 in a scratch repository, including a push to a bare remote. The guide covers the three reset modes (soft, mixed, and hard) and how each treats staged and unstaged changes. It also shows how to undo a last commit while keeping the work and how to recover after a hard reset.

SparkCat malware scans phone photos for crypto seed phrases and steals funds

Kaspersky has identified a malware called SparkCat that hides inside ordinary-looking applications, including some distributed through official app stores. It scans the photo gallery for seed phrases, which are often stored as screenshots or photos, and sends them to attackers. Once an attacker has a seed phrase, the victim's cryptocurrency can be drained. The article advises keeping seed phrases offline in a secure, durable location, avoiding storing them on connected devices, and considering hardware wallets with a screen rather than software wallets on phones or computers. The piece was originally published on 0xalert.com, a crypto asset protection service that promotes its own paid auditing and alert offerings.

Git Séance Uses Local Gemma Model to Investigate Repository Commit History

Git Séance is a MIT-licensed, local-first tool that lets developers query a repository's Git history to understand why code changed. It runs a local Gemma model through Ollama and is built for Node.js 20 or newer on Windows. The app supports keyword retrieval, with semantic retrieval as an optional add-on. The author's submission is a Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge entry, and the draft contains unfilled placeholders for the example repository, question, and answer.

Developer Shares Open-Source AI Project Built for MLH x DEV Writing Challenge

A developer has published a write-up about Future Impact, an open-source project that uses technology and AI to explore solutions to real-world problems. The project was created as part of their open-source and hackathon experience and was submitted to the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge. The author says building it improved their development skills, introduced them to new tools, and taught them to take a project from idea to finished product. The post links to the project's GitHub repository and says a live demo or screenshots will be added later, with details on the MLH partner technologies still to come. The author also emphasizes that building software involves problem-solving and sharing work with the community, not just writing code.

ismini: A Minimal Local AI Agent for Linux That Requires No Setup

The developer created ismini, a Linux AI agent aimed at newcomers who find existing local AI tools too complicated to configure. Many such tools demand installing runtimes, starting servers, and tuning numerous settings before a first chat. ismini bundles its own llama.cpp runner, offers a built-in Model Manager for downloading models from HuggingFace with pause and resume, and needs no config files. It also includes web search, file tools, voice features, cross-session memory, and an in-app Update button, and it runs entirely on the user's machine.

RecallMate: A Voice Journal That Answers Questions From Your Own Past Entries

RecallMate is an open-source voice journal that lets users speak their thoughts instead of typing them. The app transcribes recordings using faster-whisper and converts them into structured entries stored in a database. Users can later ask questions about past moments and receive answers drawn from their own recorded words. It offers Health, Daily log, and Study log modes to suit different kinds of records. The project was built for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge, and its core pipeline runs locally so that audio and diary data never leave the user's machine.

Inaya's guarded execution keeps AI assistant actions within each user's existing permissions

Inaya Business Workspace lets its AI assistant propose changes to records, such as marking an invoice paid, rather than applying them directly. Each proposal is stored as a pending request that remains unchanged until a person approves or rejects it. A server-side gate re-checks whether the approver could perform the same action manually, so the assistant cannot exceed the user's own authority. Proposals, approvals and rejections are logged, and the developers note that adding new action types requires explicit coverage and that human review remains necessary because suggestions may be wrong. The company also states that its workspace has not yet undergone an independent security audit.

Developer Builds WebGL Simulator for Visualizing Mechanical Engineering Equations

A developer has created Mecha Atelier, a browser-based visualization studio that turns mechanical engineering equations into interactive 3D simulations. The author notes that students typically rely on static textbook diagrams or outdated applets, which make it hard to grasp how structures respond to changing conditions. The tool is built with Next.js 14, Three.js, React Three Fiber, Zustand, and TypeScript, and it deforms 3D meshes along mathematical curves in real time at about 60 frames per second. The write-up also covers avoiding excessive React re-renders during high-frequency interactions and modeling thermal systems such as multi-layer conduction networks.

RecallMate: A Voice Journal That Lets You Query Your Own Past Entries

RecallMate is an open-source voice journal that lets users speak their thoughts instead of typing them. The app transcribes recordings with faster-whisper, converts them into structured entries, and stores them in a database. Users can later ask questions about past entries and receive answers drawn from their own recorded words. It offers Health, Daily log, and Study log modes to suit different kinds of records. The project was built as a submission to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge, and its core pipeline runs locally so no audio is sent to external servers.

Rauf fined and given demerit point after altercation with Jacks

Fast bowler Haris Rauf has been fined and handed a demerit point following an altercation involving Will Jacks. The disciplinary action comes after Rauf was previously banned for two ODIs last year for earlier breaches. The incident underlines the ongoing scrutiny of his conduct on the field. Further details of the altercation have been limited in the initial report.

Indie Author Shares How a Romance Series Was Structured and Distributed on Amazon KDP

An indie romantic comedy author describes applying software development concepts to scaling a book catalog. The author created the Impossible Meet-Cute Series, in which each standalone romance shares a common thematic universe. The series is released in modular installments through Amazon KDP and Draft2Digital, with distribution extended to Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play Books. The author also notes that reader feedback is used to refine pacing, character dynamics, and trope choices for future books.